Apple’s Swift programming language will add support for Windows 10

In an effort to expand the number of platforms where Swift is available and supported, Swift programming language Version 5.3 will add support for Windows 10 and additional Linux distributions, according to a post published by The Register. Developed by Apple, Swift is a very popular programing language, it’s also a very popular alternative to Objective-C, a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language.

The minimum required version of Windows 10 will be Version 10.0.17763.0, which is the October 2018 update. Swift for Windows 10, however, will help you with back-end development only. And since SwiftUI is tied to Apple’s operating system, it won’t help you build GUI applications and recompile them for Windows.

At present, you can use Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to run the Swift compiler, but there is a caveat — REPL, short for Read Eval Print Loop, doesn’t work in WSL 1.0.

“A better supported Swift on Windows and Linux will help adoption, but this will be primarily for server-side or non-visual code. Windows Swift for Tensorflow, used for working with ML models, is a good use case alongside projects like Vapor,” The Register notes.